The Phony Campaign — 2011-10-31 Update

Apologies: Power problems at Pun Salad World Headquarters delayed this
week's phony update. Is there any reason that PSNH's three largest
power outages of all time have all been in the last three
years?

But grousing about lousy electrical utilities is not why we're here.
There were a couple of phony surprises this week:

Former House Speaker and White House hopeful Newt Gingrich said
Wednesday he is not sure if the public feuding between former
Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry is real or
staged by their campaign consultants.

Holy phony acrimony, Batman! But that got me thinking…

Topic for discussion: what lessons could political campaigns learn from
professional wrestling? We've seen a couple of migrations from one world
to the other: Jesse
Ventura and Linda McMahon;
who would be a good candidate for going the other way? Most importantly,
are we ever going to see the political equivalent of the WWE Divas?

There's an op-ed column just begging to be written.
Over to you, George F. Will!

Herman Cain is Mitt Romney's worst nightmare, but not for the reasons
you might think.

Sure, the former pizza company CEO shares top-tier status with Romney in
most national polls of GOP voters, and his fortunes are on the rise in
early voting states. But nobody outside his small circle of advisers
believes that Cain has a significant chance of winning the nomination.

The most serious threat Cain poses to Romney is that his candidacy,
however fragile and fleeting, underscores the power of a virtue that
Romney seems to lack: Authenticity.

That was the bugaboo for Romney four years ago when his policy shifts on
abortion, guns, health care and several other issues both failed to
endear him to conservatives and undercut inroads he could have made with
moderates. Worse, Romney limped out of the 2008 race looking like a
phony.

If you're a phony aficionado, Fournier's article is worth reading
in its entirety.

There are different paths to phoniness, however. Steve
Chapman found that Herman Cain, Mr. Authentic himself, is pretty
hard to pin down.

For a while during last Tuesday's Republican debate, it wasn't
clear if Herman Cain was running for president of the United States
or the Fruit Vendors Association. Responding to a criticism of his
"9-9-9" tax plan, Cain said, "This is an example of mixing apples
and oranges. The state tax is an apple. We are replacing the
current tax code with oranges."

When more criticisms came, he again took refuge in the produce
aisle. Cain was not taking a position on apples, but he was stoutly
in favor of oranges, and he was adamant that they should never be
placed in the same bag.

What the exchanges revealed is that Cain lacks a flair for
metaphor as well as a working grasp of his own platform. He
emphatically denied the charge that his 9 percent business levy
would function as a value-added tax. But the analysis commissioned
by his own campaign, which he urged everyone to read, takes a
somewhat different view.

Chapman found similar confusion when looking at Cain's stands on
a host of other issues. His observation:

The danger of anyone becoming president without any political experience
is not just that he doesn't know many things, but that he doesn't know
what he doesn't know. Cain has an additional problem: He doesn't know
what he thinks.

Yeah, well, me neither, sometimes. On the other hand, I'm not running
for high political office.

But last week, we had a separate vote on a part of the jobs bill that
would put 400,000 teachers, firefighters and police officers back on the
job, paid for by asking people who make more than $1 million to pay
one-half of 1 percent in additional taxes. For somebody making $1.1
million a year, that's an extra $500. Five hundred bucks. And with that,
we could have saved $400,000 [sic] jobs.

We (again) have the rhetoric that he's merely advocating "asking people"
to pay more taxes. That's dishonest, and insults the intelligence of
his audience. (Of course, his audience were folks who had given money
to the Obama campaign, so we're not talking about the sharpest knives
in the drawer here.)

But the math is almost as bad.
One half of one percent of 1 million dollars is $5000.
The "$500" comes from just the incremental tax on
the amount over $1 million in the President's example of a "$1.1
million" income.

At the NR Corner,
Peter Kirsanow tried to make sense out of the numbers in a couple
of posts (here
and here).
Sample: The IRS reported only 235,413 taxpayers making over $1 million
last year. "Asking" for $500 from each of them gives just under $118
million. That's about one-fifth of a Solyndra loan guarantee. And it's
less than $300 for each of those 400,000 jobs Obama claims "we could
have saved."

You can play with the numbers all you want, but what you can't get
is any indication that Obama is doing anything other than thowing
red class-warfare meat to the mob
Democrat base. Does that work at the Bellagio?
Will it work in the general election?

And finally, the Washington Times reported:

The State Department has bought more than $70,000 worth of books
authored by President Obama, sending out copies as Christmas gratuities
and stocking "key libraries" around the world with "Dreams From My
Father" more than a decade after its release.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that Elspeth
Reeve observed that Herman Cain's campaign purchasing his own
books added to the "perception he isn't a for-real candidate."
Obviously, Cain should wait until he's President, then have the
State Department do that instead.

Bend of the River

Directed by Anthony Mann, starring Jimmy Stewart. That's a pretty good
combination. They made eight movies together between 1950 and 1955,
five of them Westerns. This one is from 1952.

Jimmy plays Glyn McLyntock, guiding a wagon train of pilgrims out
to their new home in Oregon. As the movie begins, he rescues one Emerson
Cole from a lynching; Cole is a scoundrel, but doesn't deserve that.
A short time later, Cole returns the favor by saving McLyntock's life
in a battle with some pesky Indians. An uneasy and, it turns out,
temporary alliance is formed.

The wagons make it to Portland, eventually, but the settlers' problems
aren't over. Their new home is out in the wilderness, they're short
on supplies, and they get shafted by the merchant with whom they
made arrangements. McLyntock must deal with the crook, and also
faces a double cross by his putative ally, Cole.

It's action-packed, full of beautiful scenery, and a decent amount
of fun. (For a 1950s movie, the body count is pretty high.)
Rock Hudson has a medium-sized role, and I was surprised
to learn that Jimmy Stewart resented the disproportionate
amount of attention paid to Hudson when the movie came out,
so much so that he refused to work with him again. (Or so IMDB
claims.) I thought Jimmy liked everybody.

Happy Food Day, Everyone!

The University Near Here, we're told, is in dire financial
straits.
Nevertheless it's devoted a significant chunk of resources
to celebrate Food
Day today. It's the culmination of over a month's worth of
activity, titled "UNH Passport to Food Citizenship."

Maybe "celebrate" is the wrong word. I haven't noticed anyone having any
fun. Mainly, people are just very, very earnest. Also very, very,
self-righteous. And it's low on education, very high on indoctrination.

The UNH site proudly informs you that Food Day was created by
the reliably left-wing Center for Science in the Public
Interest (CSPI). It's overtly political. Their front page
demands: "Ask Congress to Support Food Day's Goals". In case there's
any doubt who's in charge of translating "support" into legislation:
the Food Day co-chairs are Tom Harkin, Democratic Senator from Iowa,
and Rosa DeLauro, Democratic Congresswoman from Connecticut.
The Food Day "Advisory Board" contains seven more
Congresscritters, another Senator, and a mayor. No surprises: all Democrats.

There's an easy fill-in
form where you can importune your own Members of Congress
to "fix America's
broken food system." The "fix" is the usual panoply of blunt tools
government uses to "fix" the other "broken systems" in the US:
heavy regulation, mandates, rules, programs, subsidies, and the like.
The ones that have worked so well to "fix" the health, education,
financial, and
energy sectors.

The whole notion of food being a "system" that can be "fixed" is
another instance of what Thomas Sowell called the "unconstrained
vision": the unexamined, unshakeable belief that it's
all one big well-understood machine, and to get the outcomes we
prefer, all we have to do is "fix" it. And there's the obvious
corollary: anyone who disagrees is either evil or foolish, and can
be safely ignored, or made ineffective "by any
means necessary".

So the University has (again) officially
hitched its wagon to a highly partisan, lefty
cause. Noble-sounding goals are used to sugarcoat
statist solutions, making them appear to be what any decent human
must support.
You will look in vain for any indication on the
web page
that any of this might even be controversial, let alone
any presentation of principled alternative points
of view. Disappointing, not surprising.

For a palate cleanser, I suggest the great Katherine
Mangu-Ward, writing in the Washington Post on "Five myths
about healthy eating." Also: Jacob
Sullum noting a rare instance of a food-policy maven (Mark Bittman)
succumbing to at least one fact.

And have a good Food Day. I suggest you celebrate
it by eating as much as you want, of whatever you want.

The Phony Campaign — 2011-10-23 Update

Our lineup is unchanged from last week: only Mitt, Rick, and Herman
are getting enough respect from the Intraders
to push them over our arbitrary 4% threshold. And, as phar as phoniness
goes: Rick Perry maintained a big lead, while Herman Cain
lost about half his hit counts.

Although Mr. Cain is at the bottom of our standings, he's still
making phony news. Elspeth
Reeve at the Atlantic comments on the fact that
his presidential campaign reported spending $36K on Herman Cain-authored
books, buying them from Herman Cain's motivational speaking company.
This, speculates Elspeth, "adds a data point to the speculation that his
campaign's more about selling books than winning the White House."

Cain's isn't the first campaign to buy his own books, but it adds to the
perception he isn't a for-real candidate.

Let's see: Cain's campaign is doing what other campaigns are doing,
but that somehow only makes Cain a phony candidate?

I may be biased. One of Cain's books has, as far as I'm concerned, the
best title on a political book ever:
They
Think You're Stupid.

In a sense, Perry is the anti- Herman. Cain is funny, witty and
optimistic. Perry's demeanor in these debates varies from sleepy to
hostile. Perry can't and shouldn't change who he is. Voters can spot a
phony a mile away. But it wouldn't hurt for him to be sunnier, more
magnanimous and a whole lot less angry. Right now, voters plain don't
like him.

The White House on Thursday defended Vice President Joseph R. Biden's
rhetoric that more Americans will be raped and killed if Republican
lawmakers reject part of President Obama's jobs bill that would pay for
more police officers on the street.

Cheer up, Republicans: at this point in the campaign, Biden could
claim that failure to enact Obama's proposals would bring on a Borg
assimilation, and the Administration would feel the need to back him
up on it.

The "Fact Checker" columnist of the Washington Postawarded
Biden's comments a coveted "Four Pinocchios". On the other hand,
Poltifact
rated Biden's claim as "Mostly True", which only fortifies their
record as hopeless Democrat apologists.

But sanity does
not universally reign at the
Washington Post, as Chris Cillizza encouraged President Obama
to—I am not making this up—adopt the populist campaign
stylings of John Edwards as his own.

Every Republican reader of Cillizza's post immediately hoped that
Obama would take that advice. Jonathan
S. Tobin at Commentary:

It bears recalling that Edwards's fall from grace came after his
political career had ended in failure and played no part in the series
of humiliating defeats that he suffered. Though his origins may have
been humble, by the time he entered the political fray, Edwards was the
poster child for tort reform: a blow-dried millionaire ambulance chaser.
Though his soak the rich rhetoric pleased some on the left, his attempt
to position himself as the spokesman for the disadvantage flopped
because most Democrats, let alone the rest of the electorate, regarded
him as a phony.

Lady in the Lake

I've been a Raymond Chandler fan ever since high school (which was,
kids, a long time ago). There have been a bunch of movies based
on his work, some better than others. This one had been stuck in
my Netflix queue for years, and I finally decided to bump it up
to the top, even though the Netflix algorithm predicted
mediocrity. How bad could it be?

As it turns out, Netflix's rating was overgenerous.
It was be
just horrible. Easily the worst Chandler flick I've seen. (And, yes, I've
seen The Long Goodbye.)

Made in 1947, its technique was experimental: most of the movie was
filmed from the point of view of Chandler's private-eye hero,
Philip Marlowe. We see him occasionally in mirrors, and in a few spots
he narrates the movie directly, speaking to the camera.
This first-person POV might have been interesting and fun,
but the execution here is clumsy and artificial.
When the other
actors talk to Marlowe, they speak and react directly to the camera;
none of them look like they're interacting with an actual person.
At one point Marlowe and another character talk to each other
while both are looking in a mirror, which is just weird.

And that's far from the only awful thing.

The movie's opening titles are accompanied by Christmas carols.
For no reason.

Chandler's Marlowe is a sharp-eyed cynical observer of humanity,
handy with a wisecrack. The
movie's Marlowe seems just peevish and unpleasant.

A minor female character from Chandler's book is given a major
role and becomes a love interest for Marlowe. This is both (a)
stupid, and (b) unbelievable, because he spends most of the
movie insulting her and treating her as a suspect.

In the book, critical parts of the plot take place at the Lake.
As you might expect, because it's in the title. In the
movie, Marlowe goes to the Lake, but we never see him there.
He just talks about what happened when he returns to L.A.

Paul

Consumer note: to catch all the in-jokes
in this movie, it helps to have a decent familiarity with
a whole pile of movie and TV science fiction over the past few decades:
the collected movie oeuvres of Spielberg, Cameron, Lucas,
Zemeckis, Schwarzenegger and (of course) all things Star Trek would be
a good start.
No doubt part of the reason I liked the movie so much
is that the filmmakers seem to be the same genus of geeks.

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost play Graeme and Clive, two geeky
but not-too-bright Brits, in America. Starting at ComicCon in San Diego,
they plan to rent an RV to check out all the SF hotspots: Area 51,
Roswell, etc. By utter chance they encounter Paul, an alien on the lam
from the government functionaries that have kept him hidden and
imprisoned for years. They decide to help him make a planned
rendezvous with the alien rescue party he's summoned.

What follows is an entertaining road trip. While eluding government
agents, they also encounter a lot of colorful characters, most notably
Ruth, played by Kristen Wiig. She's a fundamentalist Christian, but
Paul's presence causes her to drop her beliefs like a hot phaser.

The movie's rated R for pervasive crude language (especially Ruth's:
this is a go-to movie if you've always wanted to see Kristen Wiig talk
dirty). And Christians without a sense of humor might be offended.
(John
Nolte, for example: "just more of the strident, boorish evangelical
atheism we’re seeing from our entertainment overlords these days")
I tend to be more easygoing about these things.

The Phony Campaign — 2011-10-16 Update

As I type,
Intrade
has Mitt Romney with a 68.5% chance to be the 2012 GOP Presidential
nominee, Rick Perry at 11.8%, and Herman Cain at 9.0%. Everyone
else (Ron, Newt, Jon, Michele,...) is under 3%. My favorite among
the declared candidates, Gary Johnson, is at 0.4%; must be tough
for him to get up in the morning.

So no change in the phony poll contenders this week. But there were
big changes in the hit counts: an inexplicable increase for Cain,
and an equally inexplicable decrease for Romney:

Seriously: the linked article cheap-shots Perry for sounding like Jimmy
Carter in his advocacy of "energy independence". But it's not just
Carter: Perry's just
echoing the same silly refrain that politicians of both major
parties have been singing
for decades. (See this
2004 Reason article for pronoucements by Nixon, Ford, Carter,
Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and candidate John Kerry; in 2006, Nancy
Pelosi pledged to achieve "energy independence within 10 years"; in
2008, it was a staple of both the McCain and Obama campaigns.)

I'd be impressed with a candidate that pointed out the folly of "energy
independence." That's not going to be Obama or Perry, obviously. And
it's
not going to be Herman
Cain or Mitt Romney either.

By the way: anyone notice who was missing from this long history of
political nonsense? Here's a quote from the 2004 Reason article
linked above:

Bush and Kerry should take a lesson from the one president who
refused to meddle extensively in energy markets--Ronald Reagan. In
January 1981, on the day he became president, Reagan ended the
remaining federal regulations on domestic oil supplies and prices,
allowing oil prices for the first time since 1971 to fall and rise
with world market levels. In December 1985, Reagan signed
legislation dismantling the U.S. Synthetic Fuels Corp. What
happened when all these government attempts to manage our energy
supply were cruelly killed? Oil prices
dropped from their peak of $37 per barrel in 1981 to less than
$14 per barrel in 1986.

Reagan understood that for most Americans lower gasoline prices
and lower home electric bills are all the energy independence they
want or need.

It's a shame that the only candidate making Reaganesque noises in this
area is Ron
Paul.

Speaking of Dr. Paul, even though he's too much of a long shot to
include in our Phony Poll, we should give him an honorable
mention for his phony eyebrows.

But for real [sic] phoniness, the Obama Administration
is a reliable weekly source. It's like drinking from a firehose!
Ed
Morrissey examined a recent bit of Barackrobatics:

Old and busted: Jobs "saved or created." New
hotness: Jobs "supported." In attempting to advance the
argument for Barack Obama's new jobs stimulus plan, the White House has
decided to create a new term that has, er, even less meaning than their
previous measure[.]

The rhetoric is silly, but the unstated strategy
is obvious: transforming programs
initially justified as
one-time "emergency"
spending into a long-term Federal commitment, allowing states and
localities to dodge tough choices.

Limitless

The new TV season is slowing down our movie-watching some. But we
managed to slip this in.

Bradley Cooper plays Eddie, who, as the movie begins, is sliding down
the slippery slope to Loserville. He's divorced, and his current
girlfriend has given up on him. He (unaccountably) has a book contract,
but he's stuck with writer's block on page zero. And his apartment's
messy.

But fortune strikes him in the person of Vernon, his ex-brother-in-law, who's
also an (ex?-) drug dealer. He offers Eddie this little clear pill
called NZT; since Eddie's obviously not best at Making Good Choices,
he takes it.
As it turns out, NZT unlocks Eddie's untapped mental powers. (There's
some mumbo-jumbo about people normally only using a small percent
of their brains; this is bullshit, but you can
buy into it for the length of this flick.)

There are complications: Vernon obtained the pill illicitly from people
not above using deadly violence. NZT wears off, and
continued use has nasty side effects. And Eddie
gets involved with a Master of the Universe (Robert De Niro), who's
looking to exploit Eddie's new skills by fair means or foul. It's not
clear that Eddie can make his way to a happy ending.

An interesting plot,
and a lot of the dialog is clever. Cooper manages to make Eddie a
sympathetic character, and there's some fancy camera work that's fun to
watch. I almost gave it four stars, but (frankly) it drags a bit
about two-thirds through.

The Phony Campaign — 2011-10-09 Update

Chris Christie and Sarah Palin took themselves OUT of the running this week. At Intrade nobody
was sufficiently impressed with the remaining candidates to
raise them above our (arbitrary) 4% threshold, so we're down to
looking at the phony numbers for three GOP candidates.

In an unusual development, politicians got some stiff phony
competition this
week from non-pols:

Margie Phelps of the homosexual-hating Westboro Baptist
Church announced plans to picket Steve Jobs's funeral
via
her iPhone.

Not to be outdone, the "Occupy Wall Street" protesters professed
to be outraged at "greed".
Simultaneously, they emitted
a proposed list of demands that can fairly be summed up as: "give me a
bunch of free stuff I don't have to work for."

Could mere mainstream politicians hope to compete with this phoniness?
They tried:

The First Lady made
an effort to reassure Americans
that she and Barack were Just Plain Folks by slipping out to the
Alexandria Target for a few things. With her "assistant", of course.
And a Secret Service detail arriving 30 minutes ahead of her. And
(just like you or I might do), notifying the press ahead of time,
so the momentous event would be preserved for posterity:

CBS News reports the pics were snapped by an Associated Press
photographer who says he was tipped off that she would be there.

Media alert: Pun Salad will be appearing
at the Rollinsford (NH) Cumberland
Farms around 1pm this afternoon to get enough gas for the
year's final mowing of the Pun Salad Manor lawn.

Michelle's husband held a news conference; phony-wise, it was
a lot of fish in a small barrel. (If you're interested,
the Associated Press shot
a few of them.)

"I had a chance to meet a young man named Robert Baroz. [...]
He's got two decades of teaching
experience. He's got a master's degree. He's got an outstanding track
record of helping his students make huge gains in reading and writing.
In the last few years, he's received three pink slips because of budget
cuts. Why wouldn't we want to pass a bill that puts somebody like Robert
back in the classroom teaching our kids?"

As the Boston Herald reported, although it is technically
true that President Obama "had a chance" to meet Baroz, this did
not extend to actually meeting Baroz. And although Baroz did
receive three pink slips in four years, this was almost certainly a
legal technicality forced by temporary budget uncertainty: he remains
employed by the Boston Public School system. And putting
Baroz "back in the classroom"? It's not clear he was ever in a
classroom: his current position is "literacy and data coach", which
involves "analyzing MCAS [state testing]
data and applying it to teachers' everyday
lessons."

Mitt Romney (a front-running 61.9% at Intrade) issued
a paper late last month: "Here is How I Will Control Federal Spending".
At Reason, Peter
Suderman analyzed:

The first half of the essay might have better been titled "How President
Obama, Who Has the Job I Would Like to Have, Didn't Control Spending,
And Should Not Be Re-elected." But eventually, Romney offers his own
zippy prescription for keeping federal spending in check--cut federal
spending, cap it at a percentage of GDP, and then pass a balanced budget
amendment to the Constitution.

Suderman has his own criticisms, but here are a couple of mine:

It's nice to advocate a Balanced Budget Amendment. But here is
the Presidential role in the process of
amending the United States Constitution: none
whatsoever.

Here is an important word that does describe one of the
Constitutional tools the President may employ in controlling
federal spending: veto. Here is the number of times
that word appears in Romney's essay: zero point zero.

As a front-runner, Romney can probably afford to stay "respectable",
non-threatening, safe, etc. The risk is: maybe people will start
to notice that his proposals don't involve him actually taking
Presidential responsibilities seriously.

3 Idiots

An epic Bollywood flick from 2009. And when I say "epic", I mean
"nearly three hours long." You can almost hear the filmmakers saying:
"Hey, let's put one more thing in there." According to Wikipedia, it set box
office records in India, and got all kinds of awards; if you'd like
to know how your movie taste comports with Indian critics and
moviegoers, this is a good choice.

The movie centers around three young men, Farhan, Raju, and Rancho, who
originally met
at a competitive engineering college. (Roughly: the Indian MIT.)
Ten years later, their irritating college nemesis, Chatur, dupes Farhan
and Raju into
joining him in seeking out Rancho. Why? Because Chatur and Rancho
had a bet about who would be more successful, Chatur is pretty sure
he's won, and he would like to humiliate Rancho and his friends.

Most of the story is told in flashbacks to the lads' college exploits,
which involved plenty of wild hijinks, but also melodrama and tragedy.
Forbidden love, academic tyranny, suicide, toilet humor, medical
emergencies,
wacky misunderstandings, … it's all here! Also Bollywood
song and dance, which is an (um) acquired taste. My cats scampered
from the room.

There are a couple of plot twists (didn't see them coming) and
a big surprise ending (which I did see coming 90 minutes away, and
you will too).

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Book Two in my quest to (at long last) read through the Harry Potter
series. So far, so good!

It's Harry's second year at Hogwarts, although he barely makes it.
A good-hearted elf named Dobby would prefer that Harry stay in the non-magical
world, where he'll be safer; Dobby engages in all sorts of trickery
to keep Harry at home with his despicable step-family, the Dursleys.

But it wouldn't be very interesting if Harry wasn't in some sort
of peril, and so he (barely) makes it to Hogwarts, where he tasks
himself with finding the titular Chamber of
Secrets, hidden somewhere in the school's magical innards.
Because something evil is slithering through Hogwarts, detected
only by Harry. Bad things happen to good people, including
Ron Weasley's little sister Ginny. Can Harry save her in time?.

It's not all grim, though. Comic relief is provided
by the new instructor in Defense Against the Dark
Arts, Gilderoy Lockhart, whose incompetence is
matched only by his vanity. (Kenneth Branagh
played him very well in the movie.)

The Phony Campaign — 2011-10-02 Update

Our arbitrary 4% Intrade
criterion
demands that Herman Cain be IN our phony poll this week (at 4.4%) and Sarah Palin
to be OUT (at
3.9%). This is as I type, early Sunday morning; by the time
you read this, things could change. It may seem the Intraders
are needlessly volatile, but they're only trying to follow the mood
swings of the GOP electorate, and the tergiversations of unannounced
candidates. It's like trying to bet on the fate of Schrödinger's
Cat, or the object of the affections of a fickle Omaha homecoming queen.

I certainly hope Mitt Romney is as insincere
as he appears to be. The alternative is that he really does, as he says,
"see eye to eye" with Donald Trump on the question of China. In case
you've forgotten Trump's position on China, it is:

Charles Krauthammer notes a sense in which President
Obama's
is actually less phony this time around, given his recent pivot
to hard-left rhetoric:

But this is more than a political calculation. It is more than just a
pander to his base. It is a pander to himself: Obama is a member
of his base. He believes this stuff. It is an easy and comfortable
political shift for him, because it's a shift from a phony centrism back
to his social-democratic core, from positioning to
authenticity.

The authentic Obama is
a leveler, a committed social democrat, a staunch believer in the
redistributionist state, a tribune, above all, of "fairness" --
understood as government-imposed and government-enforced equality.

I hope Obama will continue his path toward refreshing honesty in this
area.

Governor
Rick Perry espies phoniness in all the talk about the "Buffett Rule."
(Roughly: millionaires shouldn't pay income taxes at a lower rate
than their secretaries, which Warren Buffett
implied—falsely—was a common occurrence).

When asked if he thinks taxing millionaires will kill jobs, Perry said,
"I think taxing millionaires is such a fake way to talk about what's
going on in this country."

If you Google that quote, by the way, you'll find it mostly on lefty
sites, who are outraged that Perry is presuming to know more about
the real world than Saint Warren.

Obama is proposing to raise taxes because of some cockamamie yarn
Warren Buffett has been peddling about his allegedly overtaxed
secretary. Yet the court eunuchs of the media persist in taking Buffett
seriously as a archetypal exemplar of the "American business community"
rather than as an especially well-connected crony.

Steyn's column deserves a read-the-whole-thing award. I also liked this:

Occidental, Columbia, Harvard Law, a little light community organizing,
a couple of years timeserving in a state legislature: That's what
America's elites regard as an impressive resume rather than a bleak
indictment of contemporary notions of "accomplishment."